Good morning, good morning, good morning, and welcome, welcome, welcome. It is time now for city matters right here on K one, the one you trust. If it matters to you, it matters to the city, have city councilor Aaron Kirkpatrick here with is. And of course we're recapping last night's city council I mean, first of all, welcome aboard today.
Good morning, Tom, Good morning Bartlesville. It is always a pleasure to be back with you, and this is my first time doing it in this format. Been on citizens to be heard a few times, but it's the first time you get to sit down as a city council member who you're kind of by myself and recap in the meetings.
We're gonna take it nice and slow. We're gonna start off with the library grant. This the first vote took place when you were absent. Yes, and tell us a little bit about what's going on here. This is the one that also allows people to take courses to become United States citizens.
Yes.
Yeah, So in January's meeting, my family and I had had a trip planned kind of a Christmas trip with the kids for months before, so it was unavoidably absent and unexpectedly, the library grant became kind of a flashpoint
of contention. And basically there's a grant that comes from the federal government through the Oklahoma Department of Libraries that that essentially pays for us to have a program that's English English second language training, literacy, and ultimately training people for citizenship tests.
It's been going for.
Eleven years and it's had you know, lots of people have used it over the years. You know, it's pretty pretty common for our you know, our local employers to bring in people from out of the country and then very spouses come with them, and so then it's been just this great opportunity for people to learn English, learn our culture, and ultimately for some of them become citizens.
So back in January it was time to vote on that budget, everybody kind of thought it was gonna be just a you know, a simple thing turned into not a simple thing.
And as everybody knows, we don't have to rehash all that. But I got back. I guess we came.
We landed on Wednesday morning and my phone was just blown up from people all over time.
What just happened? Have you seen the meeting? What are we gonna do? About this, and I.
Kind of looked into it and said, listen, I will do whatever I can do to help get this thing fixed. It was a two to two vote, and fortunately, I mean, our whole community spoke up on this, right, I mean dozens and dozens of emails and calls and text messages and then you know, conversations with people all over the community,
and so thank you Bartlesville for speaking up. And everybody said, like our library, A lady said last night, wonderful phrase is like the crown jewel of our public services here.
Please save this program.
And my fellow counselman heard that as well, and so last night we reconsidered it. It took a little bit of procedural stuff to be able to, but we reconsidered that grant.
We accepted it as is.
I'm proud to be able to say that our library has been fully compliant with every federal statute mandate that has been expected of it.
They've reported every year, like you know, whatever.
Concerns they may have been were laid to rest because as expected, our library has just been doing good work for the past eleven years.
And I understand this helped about what roughly ninety people who were in the midst of trying to get.
Through the Yeah, well just last year, I mean there were I think at any given time is what it sounded like. There's about one hundred people in the program,
so it's been extremely well used. And actually one of the coolest things about last night's meeting was we did a lot of citizens to be heard and we invited people to give public comment on these issues, and we had four ladies come and speak to us who had gone through that program, at one of whom was now a teacher, A couple who had gotten their citizenship or were working on had gotten driver's license, like they had learned to do all this.
Because of this library program.
And then now some of them are like mentors giving back and volunteering and helping others.
So, I mean, the.
It's not easy, you know this because you communicate all the time. Like there's a lot of people that are very uncomfortable speaking in front of anybody, right, I understand that there were one hundred people in that room last night, and these ladies got up not only and shared in front of one hundred people, which takes courage, but did it in their second or third or fourth language. Yes, oh man, it was I personally was just extremely moved.
I appreciate everybody who came and talked about the library, but especially for those four ladies. It was just it was very moving to me to hear their stories. And so we voted. It was unanimous. We accepted that grant. Everything's going to keep trucking right along at the library, business as usual. We you know, we had a bit of a hiccup, but we're good.
All right. It's also trees along seventy five. We had that tornado back of May six. Boy, I remember that because we were right in the middle of it here at the radio station and it whacked a lot of those trees there. In the media. Yeah, and I understand that there was a situation there similarly with trying to understand the whord to fores and who's the wats and buy the wits and the party of the first part on that thing too.
Yeah.
There, once again there was another one of those January issues that got had an unexpected outcome. So last night again we kind of went back to that vote again.
We look at it a second time. Tyler Vacklaw, who is the chair of the Keith Bartlesville beautiful committee which I have the pleasure of serving on, got up and spoke and told us about the trees, and you know, essentially Phillip sixty six graciously offered to pay to replace the trees that have been destroyed, plus adding some more in some other It's just to beautify that intersection sure.
And and also it has a very practical perspective.
I've I've had constituents reach out from that neighborhood just west of Highway seventy five, who because of the commercial you know, there's commercial buildings over there, and that.
Light comes through.
So those trees have been helpful in the past to kind of block some of those lights and just make it a little bit less bright at night in their houses. So I mean, this not only is it beautiful, but has our realactical impact for some of our neighbors. Anyway, Tyler got up and explained all of that, and and.
This was a partnership with Up with Trees.
So they've got professional you know, horticulturists and arborists, and you know, everything I touch whatever the opposite of a green thumb, brown thumb, I guess that's what I have.
If I touch it, it dies.
My wife stopped asking me to trim the hedges because I kept killing them. So like, that's not my nothing, my area of expertise, but it is theirs. And when they recommend, hey, these are good trees here, like, I just trust them. So we revisited that, uh and and again it passed unanimously. So we accepted that grants those trees will be planted here. It should be over the next couple of months, sure, and then we'll be re beautifying that part of Bartlesville.
Cool water is a big deal around here. It always says, now, we might see some water fall from the sky today, tonight, and tomorrow, and we might not. And that is usually the case here in this part of Oklahoma. We either get a whole lot of water at one time, we don't get any water at all. Water resources is a big deal. What's going on there?
Yeah, So one of the one of the committees that I'm now on is the Water Resource Committee. So I get to sit in with some people who've been doing this, say very long time, and know their stuff, and we have good news on that front. I don't know about you. I get really stressed when it gets really dry. It makes me a weird thing for me, but if I can't walk out and see water somewhere, my blood pressure goes up. So in these really dry times, we had the second worst draft that we've ever had over the
last two years. And I think the first worst draft, they said was like the two thousand and one time when they got really dire around here. That was before my time, but I know everybody who lived here at the time remembers basically being able to walk across Hula Lake.
Yeah.
So that Water Resources Committee's been going for over twenty years now, been working on how do we secure Bartlesville's water future for the next seventy five to one hundred years.
That's their goal.
And what Terry Lawrence came and showed us last night was the kind of the fully updated here's where we are, and then kind of made the Water Resources Committee's recommendations to the Council for what to do next. Essentially, the suggestions that that committee has made is to ask the core of engineers to raise Cula Lake by ten percent, basically reallocating some more flood control, which is a significant I mean, it's an enormous amount of water. And then
we have now developed this emergency reuse process. So once the once the water treatment plant is updated, then hopefully by twenty thirty we'll have the ability to turn that on. We could turn it on today, but you have to you know, ODEQ has some things to say about that.
So basically they've proven the concept PAP.
Yeah, there's still a few more steps to take, but once that's done, that'll be another four million gallons a day of water that we're already using that is cleaner when we put it back in the river than it was when we pulled it out. And then the real big movement was what just happened at the federal level.
So there's a water resources bill that comes up every two years, and for our city to really be water secure, one of the missing pieces that we needed was the option to hopefully begin to use water that comes out of Copan. So two years ago, Congress passed a law that said that we could do that, and then it
kind of set a price range. Then we had to work with the Army Corps of Engineers, and when it was all said and done, it was just it was like over seven million dollars to secure those water rights. So our congressional delegates and people who have been working on this a long time went back and then this water bill they changed the language to lower that price.
So now instead of having to pay like seven seven and a half million dollars for that storage, we're not going to pay like half a million dollars, and so the impact on all of our water rates will be basically nothing.
Because they got that price down.
Now, there are still some things tend to go, but it's just that that's what we can by the rates with.
So now we're doing some negotiating with COPAN.
There's already a memorandum of understanding with them, so it's just you know, working through these final steps. The really encouraging thing about that is where we are right now. It gives us, in our projections at least another thirty years of water security. If the if the Army Corps of Engineers decides to approve that flood allocation again to raise HUEA by ten percent, then we will be water
secure for over one hundred years. It's important to know that in the last drought, that second worst drought, we just went through our water source out at Hula never dip below it was like sixty percent or so.
Terry Lawrence shouldell you exactly.
But we really, even as severe as that drought was, because we already being good stewards of the water that we have, we didn't really dip deeply into kind of our primary water source.
But we essentially drop from three sources.
So we have the Caney River, we have Heula Lake, and then we have or we will hopefully have Copan Lake once that process is done. Congress has approved it, just have to finish negotiations. So the way that the way.
It's been helpful for me to kind of learn how this works.
I kind of have compared it to coffee shops, so that because people confused, well, we've got this lake, why it's got water in it, Why are we struggling, Why are we saying we're in a dire drought or whatever. So we don't get to control how much water comes out of lake or goes into it. Right, So it's like you buy a coffee shop franchise, but your franchise e tells you, hey, here's how much coffee you're going to get, and you don't control it. Okay, So, uh,
the Army Corps would be the franchise. You know, the franchise owners at this point, God would be the one who sends the rain, so he kind of gives a supply right. So what we have done is basically we've said, okay, we want to buy the franchise from Hula. We bought every single gallon of water that we can buy out of hell just to store it. We say like, we've got this where this is ours. Nobody else can pull
water out of Hula Lake except for us. How much water is in there, like they're going to release it, and we are paying every single year to have access to all of that water we can pull out of the Cane River for basically for free. We've had those water rights forever. So that's like making coffee at home, right, that's free for us. When we to have water rights out at HeLa Lake, we pay a little bit, not as cheap as drinking it for free, but it's worth
having because you know, you got more access. And then what we're trying to do out at Copan now is basically saying, hey, can we purchase part of your franchise because the town of Copan has, you know, the water rights that they need, and then access to water rights that are so much larger than they can than they would ever.
Be able to use.
So what we basically said is, hey, can we invest in your coffee shop? And then we had to agree on the price, and really it was it was it was the core who had to decide. So what they did in that last water bill was to get that price so low that it was a basically it was like the water that would have come out of there was about five times more expensive than what we were paying.
Now it's almost the same price. Oh wow, Like.
What this group has done, and we cannot thank our state reps, our Congression reps all the way up to the federal level, as well as people who have been on that Water Resource Committee.
I mean there are folks.
Like State Center Julie Daniels, Tom Gorman I know has been a part of this, of course.
Mike Bailey, and you know a lot of those folks.
And then we've got people all the way up to the federal government who've been working on this for over twenty years and that Water Resource build going through Congress and then being signed by President Biden. It put us where we needed to be to be able to secure a future where we can all breathe a lot easier about water. Now, we'll still conserve, right, but we now have access to every single water source that we can
get access to. And then we're and then we have suggested to then make an emergency plan where we can if we have to run, you know, run a pipe down to you know, place south of us, in a pen in a dire critical emergency. I can't imagine at this point how it can get to that stage, especially once the water reuse process can get turned on. But
we have developed and are developing lots of options. So the good news for Bartlesville is that the things that have been stressing us out for twenty years, twenty plus year's worth of work has come to fruition and is in the process. And then the people who have been leading that process are already now turning their attention to the next ten or fifteen years and what has to get done to secure our future for a century.
Wow, that's amazing that And you encapsulate did that so well. People want to be heard, so when they show up at the city council meetings, deserves opportunity. But how much opportunity, I guess would be the question.
Well, you know, we've had the city council meetings, but we also had in the last month, we had the Flock Safety Forum that that the police hosted for us, and then we had a workshop on adult entertainment, so that was that was an open workshop.
We probably had another one hundred one hundred and thirty.
People show up for that, and thus far, as far as I'm aware, we've not told anybody they can't speak for three minutes, so we sat through. We were there for probably an hour and a half at the at the adult entertainment workshop, hearing people's stories and perspectives and passion, and then at the flock we had questions that went on for probably another thirty or forty five minutes. And then last night we listened i think to two two and a half hours of people's comments and it was
so good. Like those are honestly my favorite parts of those meetings. Even when people disagree or disagree with me, it is so so healthy to have a community that shows up and says we care about what's going on. Here's our perspective on it. Now, even that communication is the tip of the iceberg. I think I told you
that last month. I'm pretty sure I've met one hundred and fifty new people just from going and visiting with different groups and organizations around the city to do Q and as so, and I'll make an appeal or just an offer to anybody who's watching this if you have a group that gets together like that, doesn't matter what the group is, I'm happy to come and visit with you. I love doing Q and A's where I get to
hear what's important to you. And every time there's been things I've walked away with saying, oh, nobody, I've not heard anybody share that concern before.
That's worth looking into and see if there's a way that we can help.
So if you're looking for an opportunity to speak to someone on the city council, I'm happy to come.
But the thing that I want to say the most is.
Just how.
How encouraging it is to see the level of engagement that we have and yes and to come. I mean, a healthy community is not a community devoid of conflict. A healthy community will have disagreements and conflict, but healthy communities work through it intentionally and listen to each other and then find a path forward together. And we've seen a lot of that over the last month or more and it's been really, really a fun part of being on the council.
Great Aaron Kirkpatrick, thank you for being with us today. It's my pleasure and you know we look forward to seeing you again here real soon. Thanks folks, you've been watching and listening to